John Ciardi
| birth_place = Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America | death_date = March | death_place = Metuchen, New Jersey, USA | religion = | spouse = Judith Hostetter''POET JOHN CIARDI, ACCLAIMED FOR TRANSLATION OF 'INFERNO,' DIES.'' Los Angeles Times. Part 1; Page 15; Column 1; Metro Desk. April 1, 1986. | children = a daughter, Myra; two sons, John L. and Benn A. |nationality = United States |field = Poet, etymologist |work_institutions = U. of Missouri at Kansas City, Harvard, Rutgers | notableworks = La Divina Commedia translation | ethnicity = Italian | citizenship = USA | occupation = poet, teacher, etymologist, translator | website = }} John Anthony Ciardi (CHAR-dee) (June 24, 1916 - March 30, 1986) was an American poet, translator, and etymologist. Life Overview In addition to writing and publishing several volumes of original poetry, he translated Dante's Divine Comedy, wrote several volumes of children's poetry, pursued etymology, contributed to the Saturday Review as a columnist and long-time poetry editor, and directed the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in Vermont. In 1959, Ciardi published a book on how to read, write, and teach poetry, How Does a Poem Mean?, which has proven to be among the most-used books of its kind. At the peak of his popularity in the early 1960s, Ciardi also had a network television program on CBS, Accent. Ciardi's impact on poetry is perhaps best measured through the younger poets whom he influenced as a teacher and as editor of The Saturday Review. Life Ciardi was born at home in Boston's Little Italy. After the death of his father in 1919, he was raised by his Italian mother (who was illiterate) and his 3 older sisters, all of whom scrimped and saved until they had enough money to send him to college. In 1921, 2 years after his father was killed in an automobile accident, the family moved to Medford, Massachusetts, where the young Ciardi peddled vegetables to the neighbors and attended public schools." Ciardi began his higher education at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, but transferred to Tufts University, Boston, where he studied under poet John Holmes. He received his degree in 1938, and won a scholarship to the University of Michigan, where he obtained his master's degree the next year and won the 1st of many awards for his poetry." Ciardi taught briefly at the University of Kansas City before joining the United States Army Air Forces in 1942, becoming a gunner on B-29s and flying some twenty missions over Japan before being transferred to desk duty in 1945. He was discharged in October 1945 with the rank of Technical Sergeant and with both the Air Medal and Oak Leaf Cluster. Ciardi's war diary, Saipan, was published posthumously in 1988. After the war, Ciardi returned briefly to Kansas State for the spring semester 1946. On July 28 he met and married Myra Judith Hostetter on July 28 (who at the time was a journalist and journalism instructor). Immediately after the wedding, the couple left for a third-floor apartment at Ciardi's Medford, Massachusetts home, which his mother and sisters had put together for the man of their family and his new bride. He was named instructor in 1946, and later assistant professor, in the Briggs Copeland chair at Harvard University, where he stayed until 1953. "While at Harvard, Mr. Ciardi began his long association with the Bread Loaf Writers Conference at Middlebury College in Vermont, where he lectured on poetry for almost 30 years, half that time as director of the program." Literary career Ciardi had published his 1st book of poems, Homeward to America, in 1940, before the war. His next book, Other Skies, focusing on his wartime experiences, was published in 1947. His 3rd book, Live Another Day, came out in 1949. In 1950, Ciardi edited a poetry collection, Mid-Century American Poets, which identified the best poets of the generation that had come into its own in the 1940s: Richard Wilbur, Muriel Rukeyser, John Frederick Nims, Karl Shapiro, Elizabeth Bishop, Theodore Roethke, Delmore Schwartz, Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, Ciardi himself, and several others. Each poet selected several poems for inclusion, plus his or her comments on the poetic principles that guided the compositions, addressing especially the issue of the so-called "unintelligibility" of modern poetry. Ciardi had begun translating Dante for his classes at Harvard and continued with the work throughout his time there. His translation of The Inferno was published in 1954. Dudley Fitts, himself an important mid-century translator, said of Ciardi's version, "Here is our Dante, Dante for the 1st time translated into virile, tense American verse; a work of enormous erudition which (like its original) never forgets to be poetry; a shining event in a bad age." Joan Acocella (née Ross), however, noted “The constant stretching for a heartier, more modern and American idiom not only vulgarizes; it also guarantees that wherever Dante expresses himself by implication rather than by direct statement, Ciardi will either miss or ignore the nuance.”''The Cult of Language: A Study of Two Modern Translations of Dante.'' By Joan Ross Acocella. Modern Language Quarterly 1974 35(2):140-156; DOI:10.1215/00182702-35-2-140. dukejournals.org The translation "is widely used at universities." Ciardi's translation of The Purgatorio followed in 1961 and The Paradiso in 1970. Ciardi's version of Inferno was recorded and released by Folkways Records in 1954. 2 years later, Ciardi would have his work featured again on an album entitled, '' As If: Poems, New and Selected, by John Ciardi.'' In 1953, Ciardi joined the English Department at Rutgers University in order to begin a writing program, but after eight successful years there, he resigned his professorship in 1961 in favor of several other more lucrative careers, especially fall and spring tours on the college lecture circuit, and to "devote himself fulltime to literary pursuits." (When he left Rutgers, he famously quipped that teaching was "planned poverty.") He was popular enough and interesting enough to warrant a pair of appearances in the early 1960s with Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show. "Poetry editor of Saturday Review from 1956 to 1972, he wrote the 1959 poetry textbook How Does A Poem Mean." Ciardi was a "fellow of the National Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member and former president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters." Among 20th-century American men of letters, he maintained a notably high profile and level of popularity with the general public, as well as a reputation for considerable craftsmanship in his output. Burton Raffel summed up Ciardi's career as follows: “Blessed with a fine voice, a ready wit, and a relentless honesty, Ciardi became in many ways an archetype of the existentially successful twentieth-century American poet, peripatetic, able to fit into and exploit chinks in the great American scheme of things, while never fitting in as either a recognized peg or hole.”"Ciardi, John (Vol. 129) - Introduction." Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Jeffrey W. Hunter. Vol. 129. Gale Cengage, 2000. eNotes.com. 2006. 3 Dec, 2009 http://www.enotes.com/contemporary-literary-criticism/ciardi-john-vol-129 Ciardi did not fare well during the counterculture of the late 1960s and 1970s. He had been a fresh, sometimes brash, voice for modern poetry, but as he approached his 50th birthday in 1966, he had become entrenched and his voice became bitter, sometimes bumptious. He urged his only remaining students, those at Bread Loaf for 2 weeks each August, to learn how to write within the tradition before abandoning it in favor of undisciplined, improvisational free verse. Ciardi was unceremoniously fired from Bread Loaf in 1972, after serving 17 years as director, and not having missed a single year on the poetry staff since 1947. On Words From 1980 until his death, "he produced a weekly 3-minute spot on etymology, or the study of the origin of words, for National Public Radio NPR entitled Word In Your Ear." He also taught at the University of Florida.www.english.usfl.edu For the last decade of his life, he reported on word histories on NPR's Morning Edition, as an outgrowth of his series of books of etymologies, A Browser's Dictionary (1980), A Second Browser's Dictionary (1983) and Good Words to You (posthumously published in 1987). National Public Radio (NPR) continues to make Ciardi's commentaries available. Etymologies and commentary on words such as daisy, demijohn, jimmies, gerrymander, glitch, snafu, cretin, and baseball, among others, are available from the archives of NPR's website. NPR also began making his commentaries available as podcasts, starting in November 2005. Death Ciardi was a longtime resident of Metuchen, New Jersey.Boorstin, Robert O. " JOHN CIARDI, POET, ESSAYIST AND TRANSLATOR, 69", The New York Times, April 2, 1986. Accessed November 3, 2007. "Mr. Ciardi, who made his home in Metuchen, N.J., was 69 years old." He died on Easter Sunday in 1986 of a heart attack, but not before composing his own epitaph: :Here, time concurring (and it does) :Lies Ciardi. If no kingdom come, :A kingdom was. Such as it was :This one beside it is a slum. Writing Critic and poet Kenneth Rexroth described Ciardi as "... singularly unlike most American poets with their narrow lives and feuds. He is more like a very literate, gently appetitive, Italo-American airplane pilot, fond of deep simple things like his wife and kids, his friends and students, Dante's verse and good food and wine." Over the past quarter century, John Ciardi has come to be regarded as a mid-level, mid-century formalist, replaced in literary history by the more daring and colorful Beat, Confessional, and Black Mountain poets. However, with revisionism chipping away at the reputations of the latter groups, and the emergence of Dana Gioia and the New Formalists in the late 20th century, Ciardi's type of mostly understated verse , what he praised as the Unimportant Poem, reads much better than it has in many years. His best poems in collections like his verse autobiography, Lives of X (1971) or the opening sequence of bird poems in Person to Person (1964), or several of his love poems in I Marry You (1958) or the many Italian American poems that are sprinkled throughout his Collected Poems (1997)--all have a quietly assertive voice that pleases. Recognition "In 1956, Ciardi received the Prix de Rome from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1982, the National Council of Teachers of English awarded him its award for excellence in children's poetry." He also won American Platform Association's Carl Sandburg Award in 1980.NOTES ON PEOPLE; Wallace Heading Home to Alabama After Treatment. ALBIN KREBS AND LAURIE JOHNSTON. The New York Times. Section B; Page 5, Column 1; Metropolitan Desk July 15, 1980. In recognition of Ciardi's work, a John Ciardi Lifetime Achievement Award for Poetry given annually to an Italian American poet for lifetime achievement in poetry.Poets and Writers.com Publications Poetry *''Homeward to America''. New York: Holt, 1940. *''Other Skies''. Atlantic Monthly Press, 1947. *''Live Another Day: Poems''. Twayne, 1949. *''From Time to Time''. Twayne, 1951. *''As If: Poems New and Selected''. Rutgers University Press, 1955. *''I Marry You: A Sheaf of Love Poems''. Rutgers University Press, 1958. *''Thirty-Nine Poems''. Rutgers University Press, 1959. *''In the Stoneworks''. Rutgers University Press, 1961. *''In Fact''. Rutgers University Press, 1962. *''Person to Person''. Rutgers University Press, 1964. *''This Strangest Everything''. Rutgers University Press, 1966. *''An Alphabestiary''. Lippincott, 1967. *''A Genesis''. New York: Touchstone Publishers, 1967. *''The Achievement of John Ciardi: A Comprehensive selection of his poems with a critical introduction'' (poetry textbook, edited by Miller Williams). Scott, Foresman, 1969. *''Lives of X'' (autobiographical poetry). Rutgers University Press, 1971. *''On the Orthodoxy and Creed of My Power Mower''. Cambridge, MA: Pomegranate Press, 1972. *''The Little That Is All''. Rutgers University Press, 1974. *''For Instance''. New York: Norton, 1979. *(With Asimov) A Grossery of Limericks. Norton, 1981. *''Selected Poems''. Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas Press, 1984. *''The Birds of Pompeii''. Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas Press, 1985. *''The Hopeful Trout and other limericks''. Houghton, 1989. *''Echoes: Poems Left Behind''. Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas Press, 1989. *''Poems of Love and Marriage''. Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas Press, 1989. *''Stations on the Air'', Bookmark Press of the University of Missouri-Kansas City, 1993. *''The Collected Poems of John Ciardi''. Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas Press, 1997. Prose *(Author of introduction) Fritz Leiber and others, Witches Three. Twayne, 1952. *(Contributor) William White, John Ciardi: A bibliography. Wayne State University Press, 1959. *''Dialogue with an Audience'' (collection of Saturday Review essays). Lippincott, 1963. *(Contributor) A.L. Bader, editor, To the Young Writer (prose). Poetry Foundationy of Michigan Press]], 1965. *(Contributor) Dante Alighieri: Three Lectures (prose). Library of Congress, 1965. *(Author of introduction) John A. Holmes, The Selected Poems. Beacon Press, 1965. *(With Joseph B. Roberts) On Poetry and the Poetic Process (prose). Troy State University Press, 1971. *''Manner of Speaking'' (selected Saturday Review columns). Rutgers University Press, 1972. *''A Browser's Dictionary and Native's Guide to the Unknown American Language''. Harper, 1980. *(With Laurence Urdang and Frederick Dickerson) Plain English in a Complex Society. Poynter Center, Indiana University, 1980. *''A Second Browser's Dictionary and Native's Guide to the Unknown American Language''. Harper, 1983. *''Good Words to You: An All-New Browser's Dictionary and Native's Guide to the Unknown American Language''. Harper, 1987. *''The Complete Browser's Dictionary: The best of John Ciardi's two Browser's Dictionaries in a single compendium of curious expressions and intriguing facts''. Harper, 1988. *''Saipan: The war diary of John Ciardi''. Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas Press, 1988. *''Ciardi Himself: Fifteen essays in the reading, writing, and teaching of poetry''. University of Arkansas Press, 1989. Juvenile Poetry *''The Reason for the Pelican''. Lippincott, 1959 ** new edition, Honesdale, PA: Wordsong/Boyds Mills Press, 1994. *''Scrappy the Pup''. Lippincott, 1960. *''The Man Who Sang the Sillies''. Lippincott, 1961. *''I Met a Man''. Houghton, 1961. *''You Read to Me, I'll Read to You''. Lippincott, 1962. *''John J. Plenty and Fiddler Dan: A New Fable of the Grasshopper and the Ant''. Lippincott, 1963. *''You Know Who''. Lippincott, 1964. *''The King Who Saved Himself from Being Saved''. Lippincott, 1965. *''The Monster Den; or, Look What Happened at My House — and to It''. Lippincott, 1966. *''Someone Could Win a Polar Bear''. Lippincott, 1970. *(With Isaac Asimov) Limericks, Too Gross. Norton, 1978. *''Fast and Slow: Poems for Advanced Children and Beginning Parents''. Houghton, 1975. *''Doodle Soup''. Houghton, 1985. *''"Mummy Took Cooking Lessons" and other poems'' (illustrated by Merle Nacht). Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990. Fiction *''The Wish-Tree'', Crowell-Collier, 1962. Translated *Dante, The Inferno. Rutgers University Press, 1954; New York: Modern Library, 1996. *Dante, The Purgatorio. New York: New American Library, 1961, 1996. *Dante, The Paradiso. New York: New American Library, 1970. *Dante, The Divine Comedy (includes The Inferno, The Purgatorio, ''and The Paradiso''). New York: Norton, 1977. Edited *''Mid-Century American Poets''. Twayne, 1950. *''How Does a Poem Mean?'' (edited & contributor). Houghton, 1960 ** 2nd edition (with Miller Williams), 1975. *''Poetry: A Closer Look'' (edited with James M. Reid & Laurence Perrine) prose). Harcourt, 1963. Letters *''The Selected Letters of John Ciardi'' (edited by Edward M. Cifelli). Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas Press, 1991. Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy the Poetry Foundation.John Ciardi 1916-1986, Poetry Foundation, Web, Aug. 20, 2012. Audio / video * The Inferno (Dante Alighieri): The Immortal Drama of a Journey Through Hell, Smithsonian Folkways (1954). FW09871 * As If: Poems New and Selected, Smithsonian Folkways (1956). FW09780 *''About Eskimos and other poems'' (cassette phonotape), Spoken Arts, 1974. *''What Do You Know about Poetry?: An Introduction to Poetry for Children'' (cassette phonotape), Spoken Arts, 1974. *''What Is a Poem?: A Discussion of How Poems Are Made'' (phonodisc), Spoken Arts, 1974. *''Why Noah Praised the Whale and other poems'' (cassette phonotape), Spoken Arts, 1974. Post-1960 a/v information courtesy the Poetry Foundation. See also * List of U.S. poets References *Edward M. Cifelli, John Ciardi: A biography, Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas Press, 1997. Notes External links ;Poems *John Ciardi profile and 1 poem at the Academy of American Poets. *John Ciardi at Italian American Writers (3 poems) *John Ciardi 1916-1986 at Harvard Square Library. *John Ciardi 1916-1986 at the Poetry Foundation. ;Audio / video * John Ciardi at YouTube * NPR: On Words with John Ciardi, podcast ;Books *John Ciardi at Amazon.com ;About *John Ciardi at Spartacus Educational. *John Ciardi at NNDB. *John Ciardi (1916-1986) by Edward M. 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